Chump Change (5 page)

“You are broke, I assume?”

“Pretty much.”

“Seriously, Dave. How much cash do you have?”

An interesting question, actually. I got paid from
Newsweek
Thursday. $400. Today was Saturday. I couldn’t have spent $400 in two days.

Could I?

I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket and peered inside. It was almost preternaturally empty. It had an aura about it like it never held any cash, a ghost-town feel. I half-expected a tiny tumbleweed to come rolling out. On the other hand I had a lot of change in my pocket. I dug it out.

“Just some change, really. About three or four bucks.”

Max nods, as if this confirms some private theory.

“Only this guy…” He jerks a thumb at me. “Only
this guy
could waltz off a plane with no plans, no idea what he’s going to do next, and nothing but a pocketful of change. Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

This is a rhetorical technique Max often employs, of referring to me in the third person, addressing some unseen interlocutor who shares Max’s incredulity and exasperation vis-à-vis yours truly.

“Tell me something, Dave. What would you have done if I hadn’t picked you up at the airport?”

“I don’t know. Taken the subway, I guess.”

“Yes, but where to? I bet you haven’t given any thought to that either. Where are you going to live?”

He had me there, too. I had given it some thought but so far I hadn’t come up with much. I couldn’t stay at Mom’s. My younger brother, Scotty, had already boomeranged back from college. He was living in the basement, she rented out the top two floors, and lived in two cramped rooms on the first floor. No room there. My father lived with his girlfriend and former secretary in Simcoe, Ontario, about an hour out of Toronto. It wouldn’t be ideal, but at least it would be a roof.

“Dad’s, I guess,” I said finally.

“Oh, that’s great, that’s brilliant. The Great Genius has ruminated on the paradox of where to live, and, after a weighty pause, he illuminates the world with the fruits of his meditations. ‘I guess I’ll go live at my Dad’s.’ Won’t that be lovely? I can just picture the dinners you’ll have out there in Hellandgone, Ontario, just you, your Dad, and his girlfriend. ‘Pass the salt, Dave. Hmmm, salt, salt mines, that reminds me: did you look for a job today?’ ‘No, Dad, I spent the morning pondering over Spinoza’s theories, and in the afternoon I crafted a paragraph of prose. After that, naturally I became quite exhausted so I took a nap.’”

Max adopted a foppish, quasi-British accent when impersonating me, which I found a bit odd, if not downright insulting. But he had a point, I had to admit that. Those dinners would be sheer torture. The appetizer: sautéed strips of Dave with a raspberry vinaigrette. The entrée: cajun-style Dave, raked over hot coals, then grilled with a third degree until thoroughly charred. And for dessert: Dave
flambé
, served with a side-dish of tart remarks. All the while, Dad’s secretary/girlfriend flits back and forth in the background, trying to “stay out of it,” meanwhile confiding to her secretarial colleagues all about the terrible tragedy of Professor Henry’s son. So sad, back from New York with no job, no direction, living with his father again at age 28. A complete failure…

“You’re right as usual, Max,” I say miserably.

Max casts a sidelong glance in my direction.

“Relax, Dave. You can stay at my place.”

This thought has also crossed my mind, but I know I couldn’t do it. I’m not an easy guy to live with, and I didn’t want to risk screwing up my friendship with Max. Then, I would truly be a man with nothing.

“Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but I can’t do it.”

“What’s the problem? I’m never there, I’m always at Sam’s anyway.”

“I can’t explain it, I just can’t do it. I’ll have to figure something else out.”

“God will step in and save your miserable hide, is that it?”

“That’s more or less my plan, yes. As Jesus said, consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin. Yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, translated roughly, it means: look at those flowers. They don’t have a job, but they look great.”

“That could be your new motto.”

“Jesus practised what he preached, too: dropped his carpenter’s tools to become a wandering freelance rabbi, trusting to luck and miracles to keep himself and his followers fed. If he bumped into someone along the road, he said: drop your nets and follow me. ‘But Jesus, if we don’t fish, we don’t eat,’ people said to him. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Soon you will be a fisher of men.’ That’s what I want to be, Max. A fisher of men, not a typer of postcards.”

This little speech earns me nothing more than a derisive snort.

“Jesus should never have quit his day job, Dave. He had a perfectly good job as a carpenter, then he quit and look what happened: he wandered around half-starved in the desert for a few years, relying on hand-outs and miracles to keep himself and his followers alive, then wound up getting crucified.”

“Yeah, but those few years changed the world forever, nothing will ever be the same. Whereas if he’d stayed a carpenter—”

“If he’d stayed a carpenter, millions of people wouldn’t have been tortured, repressed, and murdered in his name.”

“Max, that is the oldest and most boring argument in the world. No one can be held responsible for the boorishness of his followers.”

We argued some more. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say arguing with Max is like having a ten-inch spike slowly hammered into your skull. You can’t win. Finally, you just say alright, uncle, I give.

“I feel pretty guilty about Ruth,” I said, to change the subject.

“Dave, get over it. You never loved her, not properly, anyway. You loved her like a sister.”

“What about that summer in Long Island?”

“That was just lust. You hung around in your bathing suits all summer. And may I say,” he said, “she had a great body. But you were just wasting her time. She wanted kids. If you hung around any longer it might’ve gotten to be too late. Then she could point to you and say: he ruined my life. The sooner you’re out of the picture, the sooner she finds someone else.”

“Still, I feel guilty about the way I left,” I said. “So abruptly, spraying the situation with the blackest of lies, like a scared squid.”

“What kind of lies?” Max asks, interested.

“I told her it was only temporary, that we’d get back together sometime soon.”

Max reflects on this.

“Well, that wasn’t so cool. But it was the only way.”

We lapsed into silence. That seemed to sum it up. Somehow, I thought the conversation about Ruth would last longer. I wondered what she was up to at that moment. Not thinking fondly of me, you could bet. My name was probably already a swearword in her family: “Ow! Son of a Dave! I Daved my Daving toe! Honey! Where the Dave do we keep those aspirins?”

I looked out the window, watched the scenery roll by: trees, farms, fences. Cows, crops.

“Hey,” I said, sitting up. “This isn’t the way to the city.”

“I know,” Max said calmly. “I’m not taking you to the city. I’m taking you to the country, for a little R&R. I don’t know if you know it or not, but you look like shit.”

I knew this, in a general sort of way. I knew I looked bad. What I didn’t realize then was
just how bad
. Since then, I’ve looked back on photos from that weekend. Everyone looks happy, healthy, young. And behind them looms this fat, pale monster with long greasy hair, and raccoon-like circles under his eyes. I look at pictures from those days and I think: that is a dying animal. And I understand, I think, the blind impulse that drove me from New York: it was the instinct for survival. The organism was in danger.

“Yeah, yeah,” is all I say now, to Max. “Where in the country?”

“Leslie Lawson’s parents’ farm.”

“What? The legendary Leslie Lawson? Is she up there?”

“Natch. Sam too.”

Samantha Cox is Max’s longtime girlfriend.

This is distressing news. I straighten up, check my hair in the mirror, generally try to pull myself together. The legendary Leslie Lawson, what can I say? The first time I met Leslie Lawson was in college, on the occasion of her first date with Max. I went to Middlebury, in Vermont, Max attended McGill in Montreal. Middlebury was a great university, the campus was idyllic, and I received a top-notch education; but the nightlife left quite a bit to be desired, so I often hitchhiked or took the bus up to Montreal, which was always hopping.

One day, we’re sitting on the steps of Max’s pad in the student ghetto, a warm sunny day, late spring, sharing a bottle of
wine, smoking, waiting for his date to show up. The “legendary Leslie Lawson,” as he describes her. Max is all dolled up, hair greased back, shoes polished, freshly shaved. Personally, I don’t care much for his white-dinner-jacket, white-satin-scarf combo, but he still looks very handsome.

Les pulls up in a white convertible Mustang, wearing a white dress. She steps out of the car, bounds up the steps — she has a nimbus, a glow, like she’s being lit by her own personal, invisible cinematographer — and she comes over to where we’re sitting. She kisses Max on both cheeks.
Moi aussi
.

“Nice to meet you,” she says to me. To Max: “Should we go?”

They took off, on their date. A date that didn’t work out, or else I wouldn’t be entertaining the thoughts that are scampering across my synaptic gaps at this moment. Max wound up with Samantha instead, Les’s best friend. He was “too nice” for Les, it turned out. She only went out with assholes, apparently, in those days: jocks, frat-boys, abusive egocentric actors. What a waste, eh? This happens all the time: the most amazing, considerable women hooking up with the biggest cheeseballs, baldies, oldsters, used-car salesmen,
musicians
. I call it “The Crazy Salad Syndrome.” After a line from a poem by William Butler Yeats:

I don’t know exactly what Yeats meant by this line. I don’t think he did, either, but all his life he was rebuffed and rejected by the gorgeous redhead, Maude Gonne. Yeats proposed to her, he wrote poems dedicated to her, but she preferred some pompous political blowhard (to be sure, we have only Yeats’s
testimonial on this) over the world-famous, world-historical poet. All he’s saying, in poetic language, is: “Who understands what women want?”

“I’ll tell you something else,” Max says, popping in the cigarette lighter. “She wants you.”

“Bullshit,” I say. Then, of course: “How do you know?”

“I can’t tell you, I’m sworn to secrecy. If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

“Forget it, Max. Don’t even think about it. You know as well as I do you can’t say something like ‘Leslie Lawson wants you,’ then fail to elaborate. It’s against the
rules.”

The lighter popped out, Max lit his cigarette with the glowing coil.

“Alright, alright. Les told Sam, in strictest confidence, of course, and Sam me, in strictest confidence, natch, making me swear never to tell you, that Les wants to fill her fridge with food, and lock you in her apartment for an entire weekend of uninterrupted sex.”

He paused to let this information sink in.

“Why she should find
you
attractive, I have no idea. It just goes to show she’s hallucinating with horniness, she’s in some kind of delusional state, obviously she’s mixed the two of us up in her brain.”

Max’s comments are strictly
de rigeur
and
comme d’habitude
, ladies. It’s a guy thing: no guy can pass along this type of tidbit without an accompanying fusillade of insults, braggadocio, and testimonials of incredulity. It’s the way we’re wired, each one of us wants every woman on the planet to be secretly attracted only to him, believe it or not.

I was stunned, speechless. In reverential silence, I took a pull from my beer.

“Say something!” Max says. “How can you sit there like a stump? Open your ears! I said, ‘The legendary Leslie Lawson wants
you.’”

“I understand, Max, I understand! I need time to think! Why is there never any time to think in this life? Nothing happens for months and years, you fall into a stupor. Then, bam, bam, bam, you have to make 50 decisions, all at once. Why is that?”

Max looks at me quizzically.

“Relax, Dave. What’s to decide? Just go with the flow.”

As we drive along, Max fills me in on various mutual friends and acquaintances, what they’ve been up to, who they’re going out with. To my Manhattanized sensibilities, his way of speaking about people is quaint, charming, antiquated. He speaks of their “characters,” their hobbies, their preferences. So-and-so has taken up cooking, so-and-so is no longer with so-and-so. Cut to the chase, pal, I want to say to him. What do they do, how much do they make, what do they pay for their apartments? Those are
characteristics
. We’ll get to all this other mumbo-jumbo later.

Then I thought: easy, Dave, take it easy. You’re home now, back in good old Canada. You can relax.

Eventually, we “broke the seal” and had to pull over to the side of the road. With burning bladders, we scampered across the ditch to a little wooded area, stood against two trees.

What a relief. It’s great to be back, I thought, drinking in the cool, pine-scented breeze. Back in the bosom of real friends, surrounded by nature, a frisson of romance (sex) in the air. I felt … a bit like Australopithecus unfrozen from a block of ice: a little stiff, perhaps, a little rank, but hairy, hot-blooded, organic.

Alive, in other words.

Sam and Les are standing on the porch when we pull into the drive, gravel crunching under our wheels. They’re quite a sight: two women with hair the colour of wheat, standing in the halo of a porch light, on the verandah of an old stone farmhouse.

We clamber out of the car. Max hugs Sam, then Les. Les hugs Max, then me. What a hug. At one point on the drive up, Max described Les as “somatatonic.” I’ve since looked this word up only to discover it doesn’t exist, except in Max’s imagination. I understood what he meant, though: she’s physical, her body has a mind of its own, like a stegosaurus’s tail. I remember once, at a party in Montreal, she was talking to someone else, but her ass was rubbing against me, clenching my leg like a demented mole. Her ass was flirting with me,
unbeknownst to Les,
I believe. Now, while she breathes “Nice to see you again, Dave,” hotly in my ear, her body frisks me, her breasts do figure-8s on my chest, her thighs seem to entwine around mine. I have to push her away, ever so gently, lest she detect the burgeoning tumescence she’s inspiring.